From the day Donald J. Trump entered the race, this past election cycle followed a path from the most bizarre to the most corrupted in our history. If a website experienced the multilateral attacks this election suffered, it would have been taken down. Your bank would have notified you after one such intrusion into your account, cancelled your card and the unauthorized charges to it, and arranged for a new card to be issued. Our government knew these things and did nothing to head off what amounts to election theft.

By now, you know about all of this, of course. I am posting it for the record. Why was this information not released prior to Election Day? What can be done now? Must we live with a flawed election? How secure are we if a major adversary can influence our elections and install the candidate they prefer? If this were not presidential election, I would be tempted to go full Laurel & Hardy mode and say, “Now you’ve done it!” But it is not a movie. It is not TV. It is not reality TV. It is reality.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

President Obama giving a speech in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday. He has ordered a comprehensive report on the Russian efforts.Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

In the wake of a “soul-crushing” report on Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, Sen. Harry Reid has called for FBI Director James Comey to resign for allegedly withholding information on President-elect Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Reid, who was a fierce opponent of Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, which many believe cost her the election, told MSNBC on Saturday that he believes the FBI knew all along that Russia was helping Trump and deliberately did nothing about it. “This is not fake news. Intelligence officials are hiding connections to the Russian government. There is no question,” Reid said.

Hyperbole? Think again. A foreign government may have determined the outcome of a presidential election. And not Canada or Costa Rica, but Russia: the United States’ chief historic adversary and an oligarchy ruled by a tyrant who has systematically taken away rights. Bombshells don’t come much bigger.

Oh, wait; yes they do. On top of all the above, leaders of one of our two political parties—I’ll let you hazard a guess as to which one—argued against letting the American public know about all this before the election, reportedly saying it would be too partisan. That’s not hardball politics. That’s a hair’s breath away from treason.

Wednesday is the heaviest day of the year for air travel in the U.S. With TSA pat downs dominating the news cycle for days now, travelers have been alerted to possible screening slowdowns as passengers are encouraged to opt out of the body scanners in favor of more time-consuming pat downs. This is the last thing Thanksgiving travelers want to encounter, the worst nightmare at the start of, for many, a four-day weekend: The dreaded Delay.

Americans despise delays. We devote hours of early morning air time and untold gallons of copter fuel to inform our morning commutes in order to conserve, as best we can, our personal fuel purchased at prices we perceive as exorbitant no matter what that price might be. as well as to conserve our precious time. “Time is money,” we say, and it is true! Late arrival at work might get your pay or vacation time docked. Too many late arrivals can get you fired. Not good news in a bad economy.

Of course it is unlikely that your family will dock or fire you for a late arrival at Thanksgiving, unless you make them wait to cut the turkey. But Americans are among the hardest and longest working people on earth. So when we hit the roads and air routes on “getaway day,” we do so with the same obsession to “make good time” as we do when commuting to work. Clearly the “opt out” movement is going to be disconcerting to many travelers this holiday by delaying the screening process and, as a result, possibly departure times.

No we do not like to lose or waste time. Who does? This predilection is reflected in our language. When was the last time a native speaker of American English told you s/he had influenza, rode the omnibus to work, had to have laboratory work done, proclaimed him/herself to be a Giants fanatic? (I could go on. You get my point.) We clip these words because we do not have time to say all those syllables. Time is money! We clip our words, and the clippings rise in currency, sometimes to the extent that we cannot immediately remember the original form, if we ever knew it – an experience I had last night when I really had the think about where “diss” comes from.

I was explaining the behavior of a character in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” at the time. The episode was compelling because we saw women get the vote last night, (YAY!) and we began to see Irish immigrant and widow Margaret Schroeder commence what may become a political career. (Parenthetically: I hope HBO allows her character to develop along these lines rather than cut her off at the knees the way Showtime did Princess Mary in “The Tudors, who began showing signs of a hard, cruel edge in the final two episodes ever. I would have liked to have seen how she became who she was.) But I digress.

In another scene, “Nukie” Thompson’s manservant/bodyguard, as one of Nukie’s rivals enters the room, asks if he should frisk the visitor. What? Oh! WAIT! We HAVE a perfectly good, one-syllable word that we American time-freaks are eschewing in favor of a longer two-syllable compound? It is downright Un-American! “Pat down” in favor of the more efficient “frisk?” WTF? It is so short, I actually had to check the etymology. It has that Anglo-Saxon ring to it.

Obviously it has to do with framing, a component of metaphor development brilliantly analyzed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980) a skill long ago mastered by Republicans and traditionally elusive to Democrats until now perhaps. The impact of “pat down” is related to other collocations of the word “pat.” A pat on the back, a love pat, a pat on the cheek or head, whether metaphorical or physical, are all perceived with positive connotations. So how can a pat down be negative?

“Frisking,” on the other hand, is done by mobsters like Nukie Thompson’s henchmen or the police upon executing an arrest. Goodness gracious, we would never be frisking tiny children, grandmothers, nuns, and sundry other solid citizens unlikely to be threatening their fellow humans, of course not! No, we simply “pat them down.” It sounds so gentle and affectionate, contrary to the description by some who have experienced it.

Thus we are lulled into a sense of the pat down being a loving gesture performed for the sake of everyone’s well-being. Nice metaphor! Not everyone is mollified, however, by our current, culturally discordant propensity for the longer, more awkward term rather than the less time consuming “frisk.” This little video clip from yesterday is apparently on an endless loop at some news channels.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

No, our lovely, and for so many reasons, eminently “pattable” Head Homegirl would not like to be patted down if she could avoid it. Hmmmmmmm. The Democrats finally succeed in framing something, and the most prominent female Democrat (non-political though she may have to be as SOS) slices right through the comfort zone. “Who would?” Indeed! She does not want anybody getting fresh with her! No, neither do we.

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